1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing technique or customizing a device driver.
2. Description of the Related Art
Hitherto, there has been a demand for customizing a print control program (a printer driver) for controlling a printer, according to an installation environment of a printing system. This demand has become more acute in recent years, because of the diverse nature of customer's conditions and installation places for printing systems.
To meet the demands, conventionally, a customization technique (a customization system) has been provided, which enables changing default values set for a printer driver in a printer, and also enables achieving an input control (hereunder referred to as a disabling process) by designating items, the setting of which cannot be changed according to the conditions of use by a user, in a user interface (hereunder abbreviated to “UI”) of a printer driver. Under this control technique input data corresponding to the designated items is rejected.
The related art is described in, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Nos. 8-278871 and 2003-208276.
However, in this customization system, it is first necessary to create an installation set for installation of the printer driver in an operating system (OS) that supports the printer driver. In an environment thereof, a tool used to create the installation set of the customized printer driver has to be activated.
Also, even when customizing a plurality of printer drivers involved in one driver set, a customizing program can customize only one printer driver (corresponding to one model of a printer) at a time. Therefore, when customizing a plurality of printer drivers, it is first necessary for the program to customize one of the plurality of printer drivers, which corresponds to one model of a printer, and then to subsequently and similarly customize the next printer driver.
This is because the conventional customization tool can only customize a driver having been installed in an information processing apparatus. To customize another driver, the tool must be reactivated after the first driver is installed in the apparatus.
In a case where an administrator creates several customized drivers, each corresponding to a different kind of printer provided in a network environment, the administrator should iteratively perform a similar customization procedure corresponding to each kind of printer. This imposes a large burden on the administrator. Also efficiency in creating the customized drivers is low.